bring faithful Catholics together. Thanks be to God. Our Lord has drawn the line. He drew it in the Gospel. “You’re either with me or you’re against me”. Its time to pick. Are you with Jesus Christ and his Church, or are you with Satan and the anti-Church or false Church?

I came across this reading Rod Dreher’s great blog at The American Conservative. This is a vision that converted the 17th century scientist Blaise Pascal to Christianity. We need this today in the 21st century.

FIRE.

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have departed from him:
They have forsaken me, the fount of living water.
My God, will you leave me?
Let me not be separated from him forever.
This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and the one that you sent, Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I left him; I fled him, renounced, crucified.
Let me never be separated from him.
He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel:
Renunciation, total and sweet.
Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.
Eternally in joy for a day’s exercise on the earth.
May I not forget your words. Amen.

Maxime Bernier, according to a recent Nanos poll is up to 17%. That’s 17% of Canadians who would be open to supporting his new party in the next election. An Abacus Data poll shortly after he announced he was leaving the Conservative Party of Canada had him at 13%. All Mr. Bernier has really done so far is hold a news conference and then tweet to his followers about the issues he cares about. I don’t know what he has for fundraising but the internet makes it pretty easy to get started, and he’s already got the structure for something like that in place from his leadership campaign. I think people underestimate or write him off at their peril.

Contrast that with Andrew Scheer who’s been leader for a year and all he has going for him is decent poll numbers that (that Bernier is already showing are about a mile wide and an inch deep) might hold the Liberal Party to a minority Parliament, and a slick fundraising operation that’s raised a substantial amount of money. His supposedly positive conservative vision for the country is largely unknown to people while he decides where he stands on issues based on the polls he reads.

For a little bit of fun (if you’re a Bernier supporter or were during the leadership contest), the NDP got 19% of the vote in the last federal election. That got them roughly 40 seats.

For those who are unacquainted with our Single Member Plurality voting system – due to different factors like differing support levels in different provinces or regions and because of how the population is dispersed (mostly in large cities, less in rural areas) – your seat totals can vary pretty widely depending on how concentrated or dispersed your support is. So assuming Bernier’s support isn’t highly dispersed across the entire country, which would lower the potential number of seats he could win, he could take nearly half of the Conservative Party seat totals they currently have in Parliament.

The difference between this split and the split that occurred following the Mulroney majorities is the internet. Its far easier to develop a following amongst a large group of people and get them providing money and support than it was in the late 1980s or early 1990s when the Reform Party was launched.

Andrew Scheer and the Conservative Party better pivot fast and start defining themselves on some of these issues where Mr. Bernier is staking out ground, or else they’re quickly going to be out-flanked. The next election is only a year away, and Andrew Scheer is still pretty unknown.

All this said Max Bernier still has a lot of work to do recruiting candidates and building a base of supporters that can help turn out your vote in a national election where you have candidates in 338 constituencies.

Personally, I’m rooting for Maxime Bernier. I pray for his conversion to the Catholic Church, and due to his more libertine positions with regard to the sexual revolution I can’t vote for him. I dearly wish that I could. Our Lady, pray for Maxime. Pray for me. Pray for Canada.

I was reading a tweet that Charles Adler retweeted with a response from a woman who’s fed up with Andrew Scheer’s poll-possessed, weak-knee’d, stand-for-nothing leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada.

The tweet got me thinking. Andrew Scheer is an avatar for a political party who’s primary concern, beyond all else, is attaining power. Despite what the policy manual might say, (and mostly its a manual of useless “National Strategies” last I looked) they’ve jettisoned all their principles except one, that being taxes, and even on that issue its a smoke-screen because most of their tax cuts aren’t cuts at all. Its tax credits. Its the state promising to pay you if you do what they want. The Scheer-Cons won’t even challenge the status quo on something as communistic as the government controlling the price of dairy products in order to guarantee the profits of dairy farmers while Canadians are forced to a pay a premium which the poor can’t afford. The current government is in the process of completely fumbling the NAFTA re-negotiations because they’re too concerned with “social justice” than actually trying to negotiate a fair deal for Canada.

That’s leaving aside the fact that none of parties, let alone the Scheer-Cons, are going to address abortion, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, no-fault divorce, etc. In fact, Andrew Scheer was able to persuade a significant chunk of so-called “social conservatives” to vote for him in spite of his Harper pledge not to legislate on abortion. Mr. Scheer even said he doesn’t believe in imposing his ideology on anyone. It should be noted here that Andrew Scheer is a Roman Catholic. Another Catholic politician in Canada failing to live out his faith publicly. Maybe his Archbishop or his parish Priest would like to share a word next time Andrew Scheer is spotted at Mass on Sunday.

Given the performance of the current liberal government, any competent opposition party should have them on the ropes. Instead the current conservative movement is once again fracturing into two and on the verge of handing an incompetent twit a re-election victory that he doesn’t deserve. In a purely material sense, Maxime Bernier choosing to leave the Conservative Party to start his own, and hopefully take his 49% of the leadership vote with him will spur Andrew Scheer to actually take a stand and show some backbone. Unfortunately I can’t hold my breath on that one.

So, I don’t plan to vote in the next Federal election. I’m a monarchist and I don’t think we’d be any worse off if this were a Monarchy and I truly had no-vote, rather than the “choices” that will be on the ballot next October.

As some of you who read this are already aware, the Catholic Church is in a crisis. Pope Francis along with his closest advisors are implicated in a cover-up of sexual abuse of seminarians and priests by known homosexual Prelates.

A letter was recently published by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano naming names and calling for those involved to resign, including Pope Francis. A number of U.S. Bishops and lay people have voiced their support for Archbishop Vigano. If you want more information of Bishop Vigano, Taylor Marshall has a nice summary on his website.

Meanwhile, in Canada, Cardinal Archbishop Lacroix tweeted support for the Pope that he expressed in Dublin, Ireland at the World Meeting of Families.

The question now is does this reflect the stance of the rest of the Canadian episcopate? Lacroix only tweeted on his behalf, so I sincerely hope not. The people responsible for what’s happened need to be held accountable. They don’t need to be enabled by blind allegiance to the Pope. God is to be obeyed before men.

I pray that the Prelates and Priests of this country will take a courageous stand against the corruption of the past sixty or seventy years.

This is excellent commentary on the current situation in the Church regarding the Death Penalty and the abominable abuse of minors and seminarians by Cardinal McCarrick. Its not even just McCarrick, it seems to be a problem everywhere – Honduras, Chile, Austria, etc. Lord have mercy.

This issue has been written and tweeted about endlessly since the announcement of the rescript of the Death Penalty section of the CCC. I just want to publish the section of the Catechism of the Council of Trent that explains based upon Sacred Scripture that the Death Penalty is lawful when done righteously.

The Catechism of the Council of Trent – section three, question four: It is lawful to sentence Men to death, or to slay them, in Judgement. Based on upon Romans 13:4 and Psalm 100:8.

“Another kind of slaying is also permitted, which applies to those civil magistrates to whom is given the power of life and death, by the legal and judicial use of which they punish the guilty, and protect the innocent. Far from involving the crime of murder, the just exercise of this power is an act of paramount obedience to this divine law, which prohibits murder. For since the end of this commandment is the preservation and security of human life, by the civil magistrates, who are the legitimate avengers of crime, naturally ten, giving security to human life by repressing audacity and outrage with punishments. Hence these words of David: I will early destroy all the wicked of the land, that I might cut off all the wicked doers from the city of the Lord.

The contrast or I should say, contradiction between this and what was released by the Holy Father the other day is stunning. It is almost the definition of audacious to simply overturn with the use of a pen, 2000 years of Church teaching on a subject.

I highly recommend finding a copy of the Trent Catechism before the current hierarchs in the Church cease its publishing. I believe you can find it on Amazon and if not there I’m sure there’s some Catholic online bookstores that carry it. There’s nothing wrong with John Paul II’s Catechism of the Catholic Church, but I think that Trent lays things out in a more direct, simple fashion.

Last but not least, since this teaching is based upon Divine Revelation it is infallible. You must believe it or else there’s sin involved, namely heresy.